skywhopper

Never count out BD. But Crown has just had two straight years of championship-challenging shows and six straight years of top-4 shows. In fact, they are the second most consistently excellent corps in DCI over the years starting in 2008. They have proven they know how to design and execute a top show. If they can improve percussion for 2014 they will be a very strong contender. Cadets--you never know. Even years seem to be off years for them since 2004, but they're always going to be excellent. SCV is on the rise. If they can connect with the audience again and up the difficulty level they have a shot as well. So I think it's about 49% BD to 51% someone else...

2010 was a pretty great year for ballads. I thoroughly loved the ballad from Blue Knights, Madison, Boston, Blue Stars, Crown, Bluecoats, and Blue Devils that year.

I love the POV cams! Anyone know of any videos of Crown's victory run from a normal perspective? I remember BD's 2010 run being available relatively quickly.

Last year the finals VODs were available literally within a few hours. I think they retained that promise on the Fan Network subscriber page, but they forgot about it thanks to the extra production work required for the live Finals stream.

Percussion is only 10% of the final score. As for unbalanced, Cadets were fourth in visual across the board, except color guard which was fifth. And BD was third in music across the board except for a second in percussion. The only caption Crown had lower than 2nd was percussion. So yes, Crown was unbalanced, but only in one caption. BD and Cadets had much broader weaknesses.

You clearly misunderstand his position if this is how you characterize it. Have you considered trying to actually understand what people are saying instead of writing your own story that fits the argument you want to make?

Click the winking smiley face right above the box where you type your post. That will bring up a list of smilies on the right that you can click to insert into the post wherever your cursor is.

I'm with you, but why are you lashing out at Crown of all corps about synth?

I think Crown has the least goo of the finals corps. Their superior balance between field and pit is a big part of why their Music Analysis scores were consistently high this year.

This, 100%.

It has nothing to do with the tonality of the chords, and most likely nothing to do with the fracks. Certainly BD's long-running 3rd place GE Music scores prove that the fracks had no impact. And BD also lost GE Music to Cadets, who don't exactly have a show overloaded with "feel-good" chords. Crown's communication to the audience of their chosen repetoire, both in terms of arrangement and execution, was superior. That's what the GE Music sheet is about. Here's my total-BS opinion of what BD did wrong GE Music wise: (1) They came back to the opening solo motif about three too many times. No reason to have the brass restate it in the beginning and then it really didn't need to show up at the end, and especially not twice at the end! (2) They left out a ton of compelling material from the original. The judges likely know the original and were disappointed that so little of it was utilized. (3) They ended on a unison. That's not interesting. Rewrite that to just a simple straight up take on the flourish-bang ending of the original and they'd've gotten a couple more tenths I'll bet. Stick with the rehash solo and make it a quiet closer and you'd do better.

DCI is either terribly sloppy or massively overworked. I bet on the latter. dcifinals.com is apparently still taking orders on its front page. The website situation last night was just horrendous. Pro tip: change the page to something much simpler and smaller on Finals night that won't blow up, and just post the scores as a plain old web page, don't try to enter them into your database-driven score system.

I don't agree here. Crown's 20s came in captions where the judges had plenty of room to give them 19.8 or 19.9. Similarly last year in finals, the Blue Devils got a big boost because all the visual judges except for Visual Proficiency (which Crown won) felt free to jam things on up to 20, increasing the spreads by a lot over semis night. I really don't think the judges were looking at spreads at that point. A 20 is a statement. Crown might have still gotten the 20 in GE Music from the one judge had they not gone on last--they've been dominating BD in that category most of the year, but they wouldn't have gotten it in brass, which has been a closer thing up until Semis.

I took Brasso's post as a question about whether or not BD would try to change things up or not, and the expression of a hope that they would adapt into something he liked better. Certainly it wasn't a statement that they MUST change their ways.

Corps can do what they want. But I think it's lame to exclude people for any reason unrelated to their skills on the field. I'd like to see DCI and the corps actively seeking to expand the number of women in the activity at all levels--most particularly in the administration, design, and caption heads of World Class. Colts are the only WC corps with a female director, I believe. I think it'd be good for the activity all around. I am very glad to see the championship corps this year having a female lead drum major. Has that happened before? She's awesome!

Also the only corps to ever have participated in a lower division of DCI to have won the top division. To turn things around, the only corps that's still around that won their first championship while Carolina Crown has even existed is Phantom.

She's maxing out the visual score... multiple responsibilities.

In other words: Take THAT, George Hopkins!

Because Music GE is not an average of brass and percussion?

I thought there was only the one other perfect brass score. Anyway, yes, too many perfect visual scores. The unwillingness of the music judges to use 20s is a further way in which visual triumphs over music. But FWIW, Albert Lo was not trapped into giving Crown a 20. Cadets were 2nd with a 19.7.

I was surprised that: Cadets would be the corps with the most abstract show in finals. Mandarins would be the corps that would do the best job with narration in the history of DCI. There would be so much singing. Cavaliers would manage to put on a show I enjoyed, even with a weak mello section. Anyone could make the music of Rite of Spring uninteresting. Vanguard would put on my favorite show this season. Anyone could adapt Einstein on the Beach successfully for the field, much less win with it. We would see TWO corps forming fleur-de-lis on the field this year. Blue Knights would do the best-ever version of First Circle. Troopers would come back STRONG, after a few weak years.

Go Troop! Go Mandarins! Two of the greatest shows this year!! Here's hoping they can improve just as much in 2014!

Yes, this analysis took way more time than I should have spent. Luckily, this year we had a lot more data on past Crown v BD judging than usual because of Crown's west coast tour plus the TOC shows. GE Music was clearly Crown's savior, with a 0.55 margin over BD, and only a 0.15 deficit to BD in GE Visual (after shocking me by winning GE Vis in Semis). I had also expected Crown to get a 20 in Music Analysis, but given that the judge had previous rated BD higher, and given that Crown managed to pull an 0.4 spread over BD from said judge, that 19.8 is pretty amazing in itself.

And this is, I believe, totally what happened! Crown won by 0.25, or +0.4 over the "naive" average-the-judges'-past-spreads approach. Crown would have scored at least 0.1 lower had they gone on second to last (change their two 20s to 19.9s), and BD would have gotten at least 0.1 higher (change their two 19.9s to 20s). Add in a couple of other judges bumping visual scores if BD was on last and you have the difference. So Crown should be thanking the Semis panel as much or more than the Finals panel for their win last night!